Jon and Ethan,
Help me understand the best way forward with these FileTypeId in the
IOSP. Questions below...
On 04/15/2011 03:37 PM, Ethan Davis wrote:
Hi Roland,
What should these [getFileTypeId] values be, Ethan? Is there an
official enumeration I can reference for know values for these?
I just grabbed them off the Web page:
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf-java/formats/FileTypes.html.
It makes sense to me to use netCDF since it is the intent of the
IOSP to act like netCDF OPeNDAP in every case.
The ID values should uniquely identify the "file type". The web page
enumerates the values we know. We encourage everyone that implements an
IOSP to select an ID not on the list and let us know so we can update
the list.
So, I think rather than use "netCDF" you should decide on an ID unique
to your IOSP. Or, if all the datasets behind one of your virtual
datasets are always going to be the same type, you could use the type of
the backing datasets. (That is what the CDM Aggregation class does, it
uses the "file type" of the aggregations "typical dataset").
Jon, what does the ncWMS do with the FileTypeId? The best decision
from my point of view for what to return seems to depend on how the
value is being used by clients. I thought the point of the the CDM was
everything looks like netCDF. If folks are making optimizations based
on the FileTypeId then for some cases like F-TDS it seems like they
might miss out if the FileTypeId was something other than netCDF.
Roland
Let us know if you decide on a new unique ID and we'll add it to the list.
